2015 – The Year of the Disciple

Every year I set out to try something new… New Workout… New Bible Reading Plan… Try to create a new me… Then by Mid-January I am out. Too tired. Too exhausted. Too much like the old me to really see the God who really just wants me.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe God wants those things we strive so hard to do to happen. I just think God wants more than us doing things. I believe God wants for me all the things I want.

Here’s my list so far:

I want to read the Bible through this year of 2015.

I want to lose 50 or so pounds.

I want to be a better follower of Christ and in turn a better husband and dad.

I want to care about people so much I can’t help but to tell them about Jesus.

They all sound good on a New Year’s resolution list. But we both know by January 10th, life will have consumed the resolutions and left nothing but my pile of bones made not of calcium but will-power.

This year… This 2015… I want to resolve to know a few things. Not do but to know… I want to resolve to find the place where right mental knowledge (orthodoxy) and right actions (orthopraxis) meet. I want to find the place where discipline and suffering and knowing and feelings all collide into the transformation of the life I currently possess into the life of Christ.

Paul writes about something like this in Philippians 3:

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Paul – https://bible.com/59/php.3.8-11.esv

This way, if I strive to finish my resolution list and it doesn’t happen, I still win! I will have attempted to know, to faith, to believe, to act my way to a transformed life and I believe more than anything else, God will be pleased.

So may you write your lists of resolutions. May you spend your time trying to figure out what Bible reading plan you will do this year. May plan your Sabbaths. But more than all of these things, may you find the King of the Universe who wants you to know know him not just in the work of discipline but in the moment of transformation.

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